The airline has admitted that it mistakenly said the hamster was allowed onboard, but denies that it suggested killing the animal. Photograph: Zuma Press/Alamy

Missing a flight can be quite a hassle for your average passenger, but for Pebbles an emotional support dwarf hamster owned by Belen Aldecosea it was downright deadly.

Aldecosea flushed Pebbles down an airport toilet after her pet was denied passage on a Spirit Airlines flight on 21 November and she could not figure out any other way to get home to south Florida. The 21-year-old college student said that she had been assured in advance that the hamster could travel with her and said that an airline employee advised her to either flush the animal or let it loose outside.

After hours of indecision and unsuccessful attempts to rent a car the hamster owner chose the former, she told the Miami Herald.

She was scared. I was scared. It was horrifying trying to put her in the toilet, Aldecosea said. I sat there for a good 10 minutes crying in the stall.

Derek Dombrowski, spokesman for Spirit Airlines, acknowledged that the company had mistakenly told Aldocosea that the hamster was permitted to fly, but denied that killing the animal was their idea.

We can say confidently that at no point did any of our agents suggest this guest (or any other for that matter) should flush or otherwise injure an animal, Dombrowski said by email. It is incredibly disheartening to hear this guest reportedly decided to end her own pets life.

Pebbles is just the latest emotional support animal to make headlines in the US. In January, an emotional support peacock named Dexter was barred from traveling on a United Airlines flight, despite having been bought its own ticket.

]]>This team of refugees reminds us of exactly what the Olympics is about unity.http://www.palakpakin.com/this-team-of-refugees-reminds-us-of-exactly-what-the-olympics-is-about-unity/
Sun, 18 Feb 2018 06:06:43 +0000http://www.palakpakin.com/?p=383518

At the Rio Olympics in 2016, ten athletes came together to compete under a single flag.

They hailed from South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, and Syria, and each one had fled their home country under dire circumstances.

They marched in the Opening Ceremony with the Olympic flag, coming out just before the host country of Brazil’s team. Together, they were the Refugee Olympic Team (ROT), bringing together people who had been forced from their countries for safety reasons, and giving them a group they could represent and compete for.

These athletes gave a face to the growing refugee crisis and fulfilled lifelong dreams they thought had become impossible. They were “a symbol of hope for refugees worldwide,” according to a press release from the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

They also were a reminder that sports — and the Olympics themselves — are about much more than medals.

Because the Olympics have always been divided by country, this left refugees with nowhere to compete and nowhere to belong at the Games.

But in recognizing the existence of these athletes, the IOC also recognized the complexities that exist beyond the sports themselves. Because, try as some people might, there’s no way to fully separate sports and politics; they are, and always will be, intertwined.

But by bringing their stories to the forefront, the IOC highlighted the challenges — and triumphs — of current-day refugees.

For example, Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini swam for her life just less than a year after she swam for Olympic glory. In 2015, Mardini and her eldest sister, Sarah, fled their destroyed home in Damascus to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece.

It was a dangerous trip and their overcrowded boat suffered engine failure. Mardini, Sarah, and two others jumped into the water and pulled the boat to safety on the Greek Island of Lesbos.

“We were the only four who knew how to swim,” Mardini said, according to Olympic.org. “I had one hand with the rope attached to the boat as I moved my two legs and one arm. It was three and half hours in cold water. Your body is almost like … done. I don’t know if I can describe that.”

The 19-year-old said her message to others at the Games was to “just never give up.”A year after the Games, Mardini was one of People magazine’s “25 women changing the world,” had become a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), was working on a memoir which was going to be a film, and training for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

And Mardini wasn’t the only athlete with a harrowing story to tell and obstacles to overcome.

Thirteen years after she ran for her life in Chukudum, South Sudan, Rose Nathike Lokonyen ran the 800m in Rio — and served as the flagbearer for the ROT. She finished seventh in her heat, and, a year later, addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council in Switzerland. She also spoke to Pope Francis in Sweden.

And she wasn’t the only member of the ROT to meet with the Pope. Fellow South Sudan refugee Paulo Amotun Lokoro, who competed in the 1500m, went to the Vatican. “The first day I arrived they treated me like a big boss, and I am not a boss!” he told CNN. “People liked me a lot.”

The stories of these athletes prove that sports can accomplish more than just physical feats.

They can provide a sense of belonging and camaraderie and bring awareness to larger issues that are facing athletes as well as average individuals around the world.

He calls himself the King of the Youth. When hes not palling around with the likes of A$AP Mob, Drake, and Virgil Abloh, the vertically challenged stylist serves as fashion consigliere to none other than Kanye West. And in December, he boasted of making $516,000 in just three hours. Though the name Ian Connor may not be familiar to you, it is to those fluent in hip-hop fashion. To numerous women, however, hes known as something else entirely: rapist.

The allegations began surfacing in early 2016, when Malika Anderson, then a senior at Emory University, penned a blog post titled, Ian Connor Is a Rapist and I Know Firsthand. In it, Anderson alleged that Connor sexually assaulted her on Oct. 5, 2014, penetrating her without her consent. In another blog post titled For Malika, the artist Jenn Deaux claimed that Connor raped her as well. At least a dozen women came forward to accuse Connor of sexual assault, and, after The Daily Beast ran a story detailing how the rapper Theophilus London had branded Connor a rapist on Twitter, several other women reached out to this reporter with their own Ian Connor horror stories. (Connor has denied the allegations.)

In addition to London, one of the precious few famous voices to have these womens backs has been Amber Rose. The style icon/entrepreneurand architect of the popular Amber Rose SlutWalktold The Daily Beast that 21 women had reached out to her to accuse Connor of sexual assault. But that was in late 2016, well before the #MeToo movement began holding powerful men accountable for their actions, and so despite the deluge of allegations, the 25-year-old Connor continues to thrive in the fashion world.

Its almost as if hes not famous enough for people to write a story about him and really blow it up because nobody cares about him enough to give a fuck that hes actually raping women.

Amber Rose on Ian Connor

Rose cant believe it. Its disheartening, because these girls are regular girls who have no voice. Ive tried to give them a platform, and everything sort of fell through, she says. People look at celebritiesor influencersas though they can get any girl they want, so why would they rape girls or sexually assault girls? But they do, and its horrible. I believe these girls because theyre from all over the world, they dont know each other, and they all have the same exact story.

She adds, I dont know why [Connors] still walking around. Im disgusted with him, because I truly believe that he did everything that they said he did. Its really, really sad.

Indeed, one of the problems with the Connor case is that many of the women he allegedly targeted are young, poor and black, so they were too afraid to report him. They felt it was their word against that of a wealthy, well-connected celebrity hanger-on.

They never got a rape kit because they were scared, and on the other side, its almost as if hes not famous enough for people to write a story about him and really blow it up because nobody cares about him enough to give a fuck that hes actually raping women, says Rose.

With the exception of Theophilus London, few men of influence in the hip-hop community have been willing to call outlet alone cut ties withConnor.

Unfortunately, I dont see that happening, says Rose. Theres this snitching culture where you cant snitch on a guy, and nobody will ever really respect you if you snitch.

I feel like probably a lot of his male friends know what he doesmaybe they do the samebut theyll never tell on him because then theyll be known as a snitch, and nobody will respect them, she continues. Its that culture where you cant say anything and almost have to sweep it under the rug, and I think a lot of [men] feel like, Well, who cares? These girls put themselves in these situations, so they deserve it. Thats obviously everything I speak about at my SlutWalk. It doesnt matter if you go to his house at midnight or five oclock in the morning, you always have the right to say no.

Meanwhile, in addition to Connor, Rose says that women have confided in her about other alleged sexual abusers within the hip-hop community.

They have, but its not my place to discuss it, offer Rose. Theyre hopefully going to come out and tell their own stories, so its not for me to say.

The future belongs to those who can afford it. This may be virtually true in today’s world, where surviving retirement can feel impossible, but it’s also the literal premise of Altered Carbon, Netflix’s new prestige sci-fi series. Based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of same name, the neo-noir is set several hundred years in the future, when human consciousness has been digitized into microchip-like “stacks” constantly being swapped into and out of various bodies, or “sleeves.”

This technology, along with innovations like human cloning and artificial intelligence, has given society a quantum leap, but it’s also sent socioeconomic stratification into overdrive, creating dire new realities for the poor and incarcerated while simultaneously producing an elite upper-class. Called “Mets”—short for “Methuselahs”—the members of Altered Carbon’s 0.001 percent have achieved virtual immortality thanks to vaults of their own cloned sleeves and cloud backups full of their stacks. It’s either dystopia or utopia, depending on one’s bank account.

Whatever your views on the show’s plot, in which a former rebel supersoldier named Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), on ice in a stack prison, is revived and hired by a Met to solve the murder of his last sleeve, Altered Carbon’s best quality is its worldbuilding. In the 25th century, transhumanism—the belief that human beings are destined to transcend their mortal flesh through technology—has reached its full potential, and some of its end results are not pretty, at all.

But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.

These tropes have enjoyed a healthy existence in sci-fi and horror for decades, but now more than ever transhumanism is ubiquitous in pop culture, asking us to consider the ethical, personal, political, and economic implications of an ideology with a goal—implementing technology in the human body to prolong and improve life—that is already beginning to take shape.

The Birth of Transhumanism

A crucial fact to remember about transhumanism and the philosophies it inspired, including the ones modeled by Altered Carbon’s Mets, is that its conception was heavily rooted in eugenics. Though earlier thinkers had already produced work one could call transhumanist today, the term wasn’t coined until 1951, by Julian Huxley, a noted evolutionary biologist (and brother to Brave New World author Aldous Huxley). Julian Huxley believed strongly in the fundamentally exclusionary theory that society would improve immensely if only its “best” members were allowed to procreate. In the speech in which he first used the word “transhumanism,” he claimed that in order for humans to “transcend the tentative fumblings of our ancestors,” society ought to enact “a concerted policy … to prevent the present flood of population-increase from wrecking all our hopes for a better world.”

While he didn’t necessarily believe the criteria for what constituted “best” should be drawn along racial or economic lines, the ideology Huxley promoted was inherently elitist. It also allowed for virtually as many interpretations as there are people, and plenty of those people, particularly those in power—especially in Huxley’s time, but also in the fictional future of Altered Carbon—did and do believe “best” means “white, straight, financially successful, and at least nominally Christian.” As a result, the concept he named ended up being primarily conceptualized in its infancy by white men of privilege.

This, of course, didn’t remain the main interpretation of transhumanism for long. In the years following Huxley’s coinage, humans made profound leaps in technological innovation, first in computers and then in AI, which allowed more people to envision the possibilities of one day being able to transcend their organic limitations. The basic concept was easily repurposed by those whose oppression has always been tied to physical violence—notably people of color, LGBTQ people, and women.

By the early 1980s, scholars like Natasha Vita-More and Donna Haraway had revamped the concept with manifestos that argued transhumanism ought to be about “diversity” and “multiplicity,” about breaking down constructs like gender, race, and ability in favor of a more fluid, “chimeric” alternative in which each person can be many seemingly contradictory things at once—including human and machine. (As WIRED’s Julie Muncy explains in her review of the first season, Altered Carbon touches upon but never really takes a stance on this dimension of a post-corporeal world.)

The Future, Revisited

As Silicon Valley boomed, so did transhumanism. Millionaire investors have poured endless cash into anti-aging research, machine intelligence companies, and virtual reality; meanwhile, the possibility of extended or superhuman life has veered even further into becoming the exclusive purview of the extremely rich (and, more often than not, extremely white and extremely male). In 1993, mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge pegged the arrival of the singularity—the moment at which technology, particularly AI, supersedes human intelligence and either eliminates humanity or fuses with it, allowing people to finally become “post-human”—at around 2030; by 2005 futurist Ray Kurzweil was agreeing with Vinge in his now-seminal book The Singularity is Near. (The Verge has a solid timeline of transhumanist thought here.)

Add privatized healthcare, police brutality, immigration, sexual assault, and plenty more extremely real threats to people’s physical bodies—not to mention the exponential growth of the TV industry itself—and you’ve got the perfect cocktail for a flood of transhumanist sci-fi shows that give form to anxieties viewers have about both wanting to escape the physical confines of their blood-bag existences and being absolutely, justifiably terrified of what could go wrong when they actually do.

But however uncomfortable it may be, that dilemma is not accidental. It has become necessary to understanding and surviving our current techno-political moment. Whether enjoying the ecstasy of possibility in Altered Carbon’s disembodied immortality or writhing in the agony of imagining eternity as a digital copy of one’s own consciousness, the roller coaster of emotions these shows elicit ought to be a major signal to audiences that now is the time to be thinking about the cost of pursuing technological immortality. If stacks and sleeves are indeed our inevitable future, the moral quandary won’t lie in the body-swapping itself—it’ll be reckoning with who gets to do it and why.

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Fear Not the Robot Singularity

The robot revolution we’re in the midst of is way more interesting and way less murder-y than science fiction. Call it the multiplicity.

In the season two premiere of Donald Glovers Atlanta(subtitle: Robbin Season), airing March 1 on FX, Williams is practically unrecognizable as Earns Uncle Willy. When we meet the character, hes wearing a flannel bathrobe and smoking a cigarette as he argues with his girlfriend Yvonne, who he has padlocked in the bedroom.

Williams delivers an eccentric and oddly touching performance as a tragic version of himself. Willy seems like the man Williams would be if he didnt have decades of stand-up success behind him. But watching it all unfold, its hard not wonder whether Williams really deserves this sort of redemptive treatment given his dark and disturbing past.

Whereas comics like Stanhope and Lange have been largely self-destructive, Williams real-life transgressions targeted a host of others. On Atlanta, hes playing a man who is verbally and perhaps physically abusive to the women in his life. That behavior mirrors Williams own to an alarming degree.

However, the most troubling allegation against Williams stems from a 2014 incident in which he is said to have brutally tortured actress Jamila Majesty for more than three hours at his Malibu, California, home.

In an interview with Page Six, Majesty says she was attacked by Williams and a group of scantily clad women for using his master bathroom without permission. I was beat in the face, taking every single blow. I did not throw one punch or kick, ever, she said. Williams allegedly burned her on the face with cigarettes as he ranted about God and asked her again and again, Are you a Michael Jackson fan?

Williams carries all of this baggage into his role on Atlanta, in which we are clearly meant to feel sympathy for a man whose life didnt turn out the way he had hoped.

Over the course of the episode, we start to see Willy as a cautionary tale of sorts for Glovers character. Like his uncle, Earn has become dependent on his cousin Alfred, whose rap career as Paper Boi is starting to take off. As Earn tells Willy at the episodes climax, What Im scared of is being you. You know, somebody everybody knew was smart but ended up being a know-it-all, fuck up Jay that just lets shit happen to him.

If you dont want to end up like me, get rid of that chip-on-the-shoulder shit, Willy tells Earn later. Its not worth the time. With that piece of sage wisdom, were meant to believe that he has learned from his mistakes and doesnt want to see his nephew make the same ones.

But wheres the evidence that Williams himself has changed or even wants to? Just this past year, he has reportedly tried to use his own celebrity to get out of having to appear for a deposition in the Jamila Majesty case.

The Atlanta cameo follows a comeback stand-up special called Great America on Netflix in which Williams made plenty of jokes about Trumps America but spent far less time examining his own troubled past beyond some cracks about his plethora of mug shot photos.

In interviews promoting that special, Williams seemed to suggest that the fact that hes still out there is proof that hes not as guilty as everyone makes him out to be.

Most of things that they say about the guy we happen to know are not factual because of those comedy specials that he keeps putting out, Williams told Splitsider, speaking about himself in the third person. If we listen to them we would be thinking that theres no reason to see this guy because hes a crazy crackhead. But weve been seeing him in seven comedy specials, so we know that cant possibly be the case.

Williams may feel persecuted, but he cant claim that his many violent transgressions never happened. Until he deals with his own history in a more honest and straightforward fashion, his Atlanta redemption feels unearned, regardless of how impressive the performance might be.

]]>Apples New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw and It Hurtshttp://www.palakpakin.com/apples-new-spaceship-campus-has-one-flaw-and-it-hurts/
Sun, 18 Feb 2018 05:15:44 +0000http://www.palakpakin.com/?p=383353The centerpiece of Apple Inc.’s new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company’s famed design-obsessed aesthetic.

There’s been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass.

Surrounding the building, located in Cupertino, California, are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents.

Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building’s design, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing anything related to Apple. Another person familiar with the situation said there are other markings to identify the glass.

Apple’s latest campus has been lauded as an architectural marvel. The building, crafted by famed architect Norman Foster, immortalized a vision that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had years earlier. In 2011, Jobs reportedly described the building “a little like a spaceship landed.” Jobs has been credited for coming up with the glass pods, designed to mix solo office areas with more social spaces.

Apple campus in Cupertino.

Photographer: Jim Wilson/New York Times via Redux

The building is designed to house some 13,000 employees. Wired magazine, first to pay a visit at its opening last year, described the structure as a “statement of openness, of free movement,” in contrast to Apple’s typically insular culture. “While it is a technical marvel to make glass at this scale, that’s not the achievement,” Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, told the magazine in May. “The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.”

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. It’s not clear how many incidents there have been. A Silicon Valley-based spokeswoman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration referred questions about Apple’s workplace safety record to the government agency’s website. A search on the site based on Apple’s name in California found no reports of injuries at the company’s new campus.

It’s not the first time Apple’s penchant for glass in buildings has caused problems. In late 2011, 83-year-old Evelyn Paswall walked into the glass wall of an Apple store, breaking her nose. She sued the company, arguing it should have posted a warning on the glass. The suit was settled without any cost to Apple, according to a legal filing in early 2013.

The pairing of the older man and younger woman, in movies as in life, enjoys relative respectability. Somehow, daddy figures are more acceptable than old-enough-to-be-your-mother lovers, Frances current president notwithstanding. The latter is usually played for the grotesque Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate while the double standard of ageing allows older men to exude a sex appeal not offered to their female counterparts. But how young and how old? And will the leniency afforded such pairings survive the scrutiny of the #MeToo movement?

It is no longer possible to rationalise as consensual certain egregious pairings, or to accept with equanimity the sexualisation of underage performers. We have begun to take a second look at the smarmy overtones of movies such as Woody Allens Manhattan and Louis CKs now-shelved I Love You, Daddy, in which protective older men ogle daughter figures in utterly self-serving ways. We may also wince at precocious streetwise teens such as Jodie Fosters prostitute (14) in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman (13) in Luc Bessons Leon, supposedly wise beyond their years, who seem to express nothing of a young girls reality or hopes but everything of a directors fantasies.

Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome. DWGriffiths child-woman ingnues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were pseudo-nymphets (critic Andrew Sarriss term), while Lolita was herself largely inspired by that most blatant of all paedophile fantasies, Shirley Temple. Sure, the curly-haired moppet gladdened hearts during the Depression, played matchmaker and performed various good-fairy magic tricks, but it was her blatant coquetry and sexualised gestures that made her box-office gold and that are so alarming today. In a series of one-reelers called Baby Burlesks, between 1932-1933, in which child actors spoofed their elders, a scantily clad Shirley played call girls and nightclub performers, pranced and pirouetted and gave sidelong come-hither glances in outrageously adult stories, replete with phallic jokes and leering camera angles.

When Temple became a star in 1934, name above the title in Bright Eyes, audiences may have fooled themselves, but Darryl Zanuck and Fox knew what they were doing: figuring out just how to preserve the veneer of innocence while teasing the men who proved her greatest admirers both on and off the screen. Often orphaned, she finds herself the darling of bachelors, widowers, lonely uncles, in love stories that feature non-childlike caresses on both sides. In the movies famous song, The Good Ship Lollipop, she romps up and down the aisle among rows of men as they pass her body back and forth and yearn to soothe her little tummy ache. What felt prurient now looks like child abuse.

No wonder Zanuck lashed out with a libel suit when in 1937 Graham Greene famously blew the whistle on Hollywoods puritanical hypocrisy by describing in meticulous detail the overt sexuality of Temples appeal. The movie was Wee Willie Winkie, and the way Greene lays it on the line in his review is disturbing in its own way his prose so wittily precise, so knowing, so lubricious: well developed rump and dimpled depravity being two of the epithets. He and his magazine (Night and Day) both ponied up after being sued and Greene fled to Mexico till the storm blew over. TheVictorian repression that produced Temple, meanwhile would give way to other, perhaps more subtle, sorts of nymphetmania.

Billy Wilder, a taboo-teaser by trade (witness the transvestism and gay coda in Some Like it Hot), was a specialist in age-disparity themes. Before his pairing of William Holden (39) and Gloria Swanson (51) as the gigolo-diva couple in Sunset Boulevard, Wilder directed The Major and the Minor, (1942), in which Ginger Rogers poses as a 12-year-old and is treated as such by her avuncular chaperone, Ray Milland, even as attraction begins to percolate beneath the all-too-apparent (to everyone but Milland) disguise. Id say Wilder brings it off with only the barest (and intentional) queasiness, but I cant imagine anyone making that film today. With Audrey Hepburn, his favourite gamine, things get trickier. Sabrina (1954) brings together Hepburn (25 but looks younger) and Humphrey Bogart (55, looks older), and begins to feel like an ageing directors fantasy, while Love in the Afternoon (1957) with Gary Cooper (58) is downright creepy.

In 1962, Stanley Kubricks Lolita featured Sue Lyon (at 14, two years older than Nabokovs heroine, and looking 17), Peter Sellers as the unstoppable Quilty, and James Mason as the wormy cradle-snatcher. Sue Lyons precociousness,criticised at the time, is what gives the film a kind of balance (which seems more necessary in film than in a novel).

The movie proved less troubling than the book, but anxiety over the subject of paedophilia has remained a constant. Still, our response to nymphet worship will vary from person to person, depending on context and changing attitudes. There are some artists and performers for whom nubile flesh is practically an artistic requisite, a spur to creativity. We see it in the work and lives of Woody Allen, Philip Roth, or Picasso, needing not just younger but newer women, who by their youth will provide a momentary (and illusory) reprieve from mortality. The men who go from woman to woman, ever younger, tell themselves they are victims of unruly desire, when in fact the goal is a supplicant: that fresh, female face who will look up with adoration, even idolatry, and who will love him perhaps for his ageing self, and not for his honours.

Perhaps here is the place to note the French exceptionalism (Thankheaven for little girls) andtheir rather more relaxed view of age disparities. Instead of opprobrium, theres a Gallic shrugat philanderers of whatever age or gender. And scepticism wheregirlish innocence is concerned, the line between gamine and courtesan less a barrier than a career path, whether imagined by Colette (Gigi) or Marcel Pagnol (Fanny). Where we see Humbert Humbert they see the incorrigible rou, and where we see jailbait they see that most delectable of voyeuristic pleasures: girl on the cusp of womanhood. How many verit-like studies have there been ofblossoming beauties ambling along the streets of Paris?

In Autant-Laras 1942 Le Mariage de Chiffon, the young girl (Odette Joyeux) is pursued by the elderly duke and marries her middle-aged uncle, but period customs and arranged marriages shift the onus from ethical or moral concerns to tribalcustom.

The distancing afforded by period setting also applies to Louis Malles 1978 film Pretty Baby,with Brooke Shields (13) as thechild born into a bordello. Thesame cant be said of his queasy and quasi-autobiographical Murmur of the Heart (1971), with itsunperturbed celebration of mother-son incest. Certainly, the French apparently take a more benign view of the older woman, often seen as a kindly instructress in the ways of love,a rite of passage for the awkward younger man.

However, once the nymphet is past those formative years, her role in the older man-younger woman relationship becomes moreambiguous. As the male artist seeks a new, younger woman as muse, so the younger woman wantsthe attention and reflected glory, even the mentorship, of the older man.

Inan interesting segment of TVseries Girls, Lena Dunhams Hannah goes to the apartment of asleazy author whom she has castigated in her blog as a predator, only to find herself flattered (her writers ego) and partially seduced.

It is a reminder once again of how often in our erotic duets we get caught in that grey area, where victim and abuser are hard to determine, and in which we are faced not just with competing claims and versions but, within each of us, the eternal conflict between rational desires and impermissible unconscious ones. Calling out abuse in a libertine age is never going to be a cut-and-dried proposition, but if the #MeToo movement accomplishes anything, it will betoshine a spotlight on those recesses of male vanity that have provided artistic cover, and ingenious disguise, for the exploitation of child-women.

Darrell and Anthony are both comic book nerds, and the latest episode of the Original Content podcast includes plenty of discussion about how the latest movie fits into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Black Panther isn’t just for hardcore comic geeks, so we also talk about how it works as a standalone film, and why it’s a breakthrough from the perspective of politics and representation.

We weren’t satisfied with just having one review in this episode. Darrell, Anthony and their co-host Jordan Crook also talk about Babylon Berlin, a series that’s new to Netflix (it already premiered on Sky in Europe) that takes place in 1920s Berlin. The show begins with a police investigation, but ends up encompassing a bigger political conspiracy and painting a portrait of Weimar-era Germany.

]]>Genius Company Installs Beehives In Your Living Room, And Heres How It Workshttp://www.palakpakin.com/genius-company-installs-beehives-in-your-living-room-and-heres-how-it-works/
Sat, 17 Feb 2018 21:39:33 +0000http://www.palakpakin.com/?p=381976As you probably know already, the bee population is in a consistent decline and has been for some time, with modern industrial farming methods and loss of habitat being identified causes.

This is bad news for all of us, as bees do the crucial job of pollinating so many of the plants that we rely on for food. In order to counter this, we have to come up with innovative solutions, as we all know how difficult it is to make huge, moneymaking corporations change their damaging practices.

BEEcosystem has created a system of wall-mounted observation hives, that can be easily expanded in a hexagonal, honeycomb style, and even lets you invite the bees into your living room. This concept, bringing bees closer to humans in an urban environment, is not only good for the bee population as a whole, but it increases the understanding of the importance of bees and their role, as we learn to live side-by-side.

The system has been designed with safety in mind, so that even novice bee-keepers can use it with a peace of mind that few other systems offer. Because yeah, we can understand the trepidation that many people, brought up to fear bees and their sting, might have when sitting next to a few thousand of them on the couch.

You can watch the bees in action as they do their amazing work and build up their colony, see how they create honeycomb and beeswax, and even harvest honey if you are feeling hungry. Check out the BEEcosystem in action below, and let us know what you think in the comments!

This is the BEEcosystem, a new way to help curb the decline of bees

It matters because of the crucial job they do by pollinating the plants that we rely on for food

So bringing them closer to us and giving them spaces to thrive in urban environments, is crucial

The hexagonal hives can be mounted inside the home

As well as outside

They easily connect together to expand your hive space

The bees come inside through secure tubing that fits through any window

Check out a brief video of the hives here

]]>Going to the Top of the World for Whiskyhttp://www.palakpakin.com/going-to-the-top-of-the-world-for-whisky/
Sat, 17 Feb 2018 21:02:25 +0000http://www.palakpakin.com/?p=381863

We edge in past the heavy iron doors, along the tunnels, ghosts whispering over our shoulders. Ahead, a red light shines on oscillators, hot lines, and silent ticker tape machines. Soiled uniforms hang limp from hooks. A Perspex map in the control room shows the rugged coast weve just traveled.

Were in the haunted passageways of an abandoned NATO base in Norways sliver of the Arctic Circle. This was part of Germanys impenetrable Lyngen Line during the Second World War and was speedily expanded into the NATOs northern line of defense against the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

Were not quite sure what to do with it, admits Colin Houston, Aurora Spirits U.K. managing director. Ideas come out of the red-lit gloom, warehousing? Tasting events? Murder mysteries? Avant-garde music festivals? The last (mine) doesnt go over too welldespite Norways rightful claim to be a hotbed of such activities.

Wandering around an ex-military base may seem odd. Wandering around one in the Arctic Circle with a distillery next to it is truly unique. Then again, nothing about Aurora is your standard whisky distillery story. This is the literally the most northern distillery in the world.

As such, its not the easiest place to reach. My flight from Oslo to Troms was delayed, which meant I missed the last ferry of the day to the end of the earth. Instead, the firms co-founder Hans-Olav Eriksen picked me up at the airport. Its the long way round, he said. About two hours depending on how fast I drive. He grins in a slightly manic fashion and we head off into the dark night over snow and ice at an alarming rate. I channel my inner Viking, settle back and listen to the saga of how he fell in love with single malt whisky and proceeded to spend most of his savings on Scotch. This all happened without telling his wife. (This last detail would become a recurring theme during our conversation.)

A trip to Islay, the small island off the west coast of Scotland that boasts an inordinate number of distilleries, confirmed his plan to make whisky with a group of like-minded individuals, in, of all places, the Arctic. Built in 2014, the distillery building is sleekly modern with a clean functional production space.

Distiller Gjermund Stensrud was the former master brewer at Tromss Mack Brewery and the whiskys wash is made, to his specs, at their new plant from quick-growing Finnish barley. After a week-long fermentation, 8,500 liters of the so-called distillers beer are trucked to the distillery and distilled in seven or eight batches in a Kuthe Still.

The pot sits inside a water bath, Stensrud explains, and because theres no direct heat, theres no burning, allowing you to capture the sweetness and give more copper contact to help remove heavy elements Youve seen this stuff before. Lets just try some.

Another old iron door creaks open, revealing a warehouse with quarter casks, some barrels and a range of casks that previously held sherry, Sauternes and Madeira.

At six months, the spirit has all the cleanliness you expect from this type of still along with a hint of cereal and an intense, if light, fruitiness and a herbal, almost heathery, element. A peated variant (made with Scottish barley) shows a hint of menthol, with a nutty, wood smoke element and again that herby, heathery sweetness on the mid palate. This liquor is definitely one to watch.

Later that night theres a flicker of green in the sky above us as we sit, hats on, in our own warm water bath drinking cold beer. Lots of cold beer. The aurora pulses into life, ribboning across the heavens, as the Norse gods Bivrst travels along the pathway between earth and Asgard.

This Jacuzzi is the boardroom, says Tor Petter Christensen, who, at this particular moment, isnt exactly dressed like your conventional CEO. This is where all of the decisions and ideas are formed. As the conversation meanders, it turns out that the distillery was only one of Hans-Olav Eriksens projects. Hed already formed the Arctic activity company Lyngsfjord Adventure, and built its base, Camp Tamok. There will soon also be a bar and then, probably, a hotel in Troms. As ever, his long-suffering wife was the last to know.

While the whisky rests Aurora has launched three spirits under the Bivrst brand: a vodka that is flavored with local berries, a gin and an excellent aquavit. Stensrud is also experimenting with other spirits, including a frankly incredible one made from sea kelp.

The distillery made sense when I visited Scotland, Eriksen says. I saw the way in which whisky is part of the hospitality industry there. I thought, we have to do the same here and make Northern Norway a destination with quality tourist offerings. To show our culture. Thats where Colin Houston came in. He had 25 years of experience in hospitality in Scotland, as a hotelier and then in charge of quality assurance for tourism organization Visit Scotland.

We chat on. At one point, Tor Petter, who is a keen scuba diver, (yes, in the Arctic), suggests aging casks in the fjord. Eriksen suggests we go down and dip our toes in the frigid water. We resist and instead continue talking about their hopes for the distillery. Its telling people of the culture here, what being North Norwegian is, says Petter. You know, he says while he raises his can towards me, we are very similar to you Scots.

Yes, calls out Eriksen, we have a dark sense of humor!

Aurora isnt even the first Arctic whisky. That honor belongs to Myken. I first met its founders Roar Larsen and Trude Tokle back in 2013. Were building a distillery on an island, in the Arctic was their opening gambit. That sure got my attention, especially when they then told me that Myken is 20 miles off the coast, which is a 90-minute sail on the speediest of boats.

Larsen and Tokle fell in love with the place after being stormbound for five days there while on a sailing trip. They ended up staying for a year with their family and began to think of ways to revitalize an economy, which was wholly reliant on summer visitors like themselves. The Myken archipelago used to support 50 people. In recent years, this went down to half a dozen. How many are there now? 15, and well be moving there permanently once the kids have finished school, answers Tokle, when we meet up in Troms.

We continue chatting. Did I say 15? she interjects. Sorry! I was including a cat! Island life. Gotta love it.

They werent exactly coming in as beginners. Larsen was chief scientist at Trondheims Sintef Institute, specializing in hydrates and working on desalination (hold that thought) and so knew his way around the principles of distillation. In 2014, they converted an old fish factory into a distillery. In went fat-bellied pot stills made by Hoa in Spain, looking like old Moorish alembics, and a desalination plant. As theres not a bountiful supply of fresh water on this rocky outcrop, Larsen used his expertise to use seawater for mashing and condensing. Might that explain the mineral edge to the new, three-year-old whisky? It is fresh, lightly fruity and sweet with a rounded, fleshier mid-palate than the Aurora. The distillerys peated version shows even greater promise. With talks starting with a farmer on the mainland about growing barley for them and casks coming from pioneering Swedish cooper Johan Thorslund, Myken is well set.

The next day, I squeeze the throttle of the snowmobile and race over the tundra into the frozen horizon. Its silent except for the cough of a ptarmigan and the faint cries of huskies. Spindly beeches grow like ink scratches on a white page. A blank canvas, a place of opportunity. Why not make whisky here?

Dont call them mad, because we are the mad ones for thinking whisky couldnt, or even more arrogantly shouldnt, be distilled in the Arctic.

The key isnt the why?, but the how? and not just in production, but the manner in which it syncs with local Norse and Sami cultures, and their different foods, fruits and even types of smoke. I remember one of my 4 AM Bivrst-induced suggestions of suspending a smoked reindeer heart in the still to make a Norse version of the Mexican mezcal pechuga, whose production usually involves a chicken breast. Like the sound festival idea it sank without trace. Maybe rightly, but these questions surely have to be asked.

Whisky is about more than just saying, we are the most northerly, or from the most remote island. That has to be followed with, and therefore leading into the reasons for choosing site, the impact of climate, wood types, smokes, condensing and warehouse temperature, and how the location influences the mindset and the culture.

In this place where winter days are a permanent rainbow of pink and gold, and nights are lit by the Bivrst, there is a sense that nothing is impossible. A place for practical dreamers, bringing in a new life to the Arctic.